Idiot Ball: Difference between revisions

* ''[[Thumbelina]]''. Every time she gets kidnapped, she keeps letting the kidnappers take advantage of her. She could be excused since she's lived a sheltered life, but common sense should have stepped in at some point and while she does eventually stand up for herself, it's not until the last ten minutes of the movie. Yeah...

* ''[[Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers]]'' has Mickey getting this temporarily when confronting Pete about his wrongdoing. He stands tall and alone against someone much bigger and stronger than he is instead of making a strategic retreat to get Goofy (who he doesn't know has been captured) or some other reinforcements.

** Given how harsh the law seems to be in Agrabah, I.E. getting your hand cut off for stealing, the penalty for kidnapping the princess is almost certainly death. Aladdin was going with the option that looked less likely to get him killed.

*** And if nothing else, at least it gets him ''out of the jail cell''. Given how good Aladdin is at ducking and running, its not unreasonable for him to go with the logic 'sure, this guy is almost certainly ultra skeevy, but if I can get so much as two minutes' head start...'

* ''[[Hogan's Heroes]]'' had a good deal of this for [[Those Wacky Nazis]].

* Every episode of ''[[Bewitched]]''.

** The invasion force consisted of [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale|a mere 2,000 soldiers]]. Pacifists or not, that's a very pathetic number.

*** Sela also held an idiot ball in "Redemption Part 2." where she was supplying the House of Duras during the Klingon Civil War. The Federation decided to make an anti-cloak net by having some [[Applied Phlebotinum]] beams between a fleet of ships, resulting in a standoff. Not once does Sela or the crew of any of the other ships think that maybe, since [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale|Space is big and all]], [[Space Is an Ocean|that she could just fly AROUND the net]].

** Captain Picard takes the lead in "Descent". Desperate to find Data and the Borg he orders most of the crew to a planet to look for them leaving a skeleton crew led by Crusher, and apparently mostly consisting of ensigns, to look after the ship. Most people, when deciding how to split their resources, would go with using their highly experienced officers to operate the ship; leaving wandering about looking behind bushes to the lesser lights.

** It was Riker's turn to hold the Idiot Ball in "Samaritan Snare." Riker sends LaForge over to a Pakled ship (the crew of which seems exceptionally slow) to do some requested repairs. Worf objects to sending them the Enterprise's chief engineer, but Riker blows it off. Troi tells him directly that she's suspicious and feels that LaForge is in danger. Riker blows if off again. Then Geordi gets captured because Worf and Troi were right and Riker ignored them. Scriptwriter Dennis Russell Bailey, who wrote the screenplay for "Tin Man" in the following season said, "The point at which we became serious about trying to write a script for the show was about five minutes after watching 'Samaritan Snare,' which in my personal opinion was the most abysmal piece of Star Trek ever filmed. My objections to it were that it always resorted to idiot plotting to make the story work, and that offended me a great deal worse than some of the awful shows which were done on the original series. I thought the way in which it was plotted and the way it was dealt with was an insult to the intelligence of the people who watched the show and the actors and characters in the show. None of the plot could have happened if all of the characters hadn't suddenly became morons that week."

* In the episode "Hatchery" of ''[[Enterprise]]'', the entire crew of the Enterprise is playing a 40 minute game of Idiot Ball. The captain gets exposed to a biological alien substance and shortly after starts acting strange. He soon has anyone who tries to reason with him confined to their room and starts to become completely delusional. When things get worse Tucker and Phlox talk about relieving him off duty on medical grounds, but don't go through with it because they can't force the captain to get an examination without having proof he's sick! Then the senior officers agree to start a mutiny an ambush the teams of soldiers stationed all over the ship, because they don't trust Major Hayes, who's in charge of the soldiers, to believe them that the captain is acting very strange. At the end of the episode, Hayes even points it out to them, why they hadn't just told him what's going on.

* In ''[[I Dream of Jeannie]]'', Major Anthony Nelson constantly waves off Jeannie's amorous advances despite her being rich, having MAGICAL POWERS, and also being more beautiful than his usual dates. He did finally get around to marrying her in the sixth season.

* ''[[Disgaea]] 3'' has a great example of this. A second version of Baal in his tyrant overlord form shows up at the school. Naturally, being the greatest most deadly most evil villain in the entire Nippon Ichi Multiverse ever everyone is intimidated by him. Shortly, they realize why he's there, for a teaching position, and Mao, with his stunningly high intellect, figures it might be a good idea to test a battle with Baal to see if he can handle the school when less than five minutes ago Mao nearly died of panic at the fact that Baal can destroy their entire planet.

* In ''[[Portal 2]]'', Wheatley is ''literally'' an Idiot Ball. {{spoiler|1=And an example of the trope too; in a desperate attempt to keep GLaDOS under control, Aperture Science engineers created Wheatley for the sole purpose of making him the best moron in existence. When attached to GLaDOS he dampened her intelligence by supplying a constant stream of bad ideas.}}

* The Allied powers in ''[[Command & Conquer: Red Alert]]'' can be handed one for their actions between the first and the second game. In ''Red Alert 1'' the Soviet Union under [[Joseph Stalin]] has caused a massive war that embraced all of Europe and is responsible for millions of deaths, numerous war crimes, and the development of atomic weapons, and is only barely defeated by the European allies. You'd think that after a war this horrific they would completely dismantle the Soviet communist state structure, but unstead they leave it completely intact albeit under a nominal puppet ruler, and allow it to form a new ComIntern of sorts (called the "World Socialist Alliance" [[All There in the Manual|in the game manual]]). The US even barely bats an eye when the Soviets stage a military intervention in Mexico (a member of said alliance), providing them with a staging ground for their invasion of the continental US. In that case there wouldn't be any sequels at all, so this is more than justified.

* In ''[[Metal Gear Solid]]'', Snake and Meryl are walking down a corridor, when a red dot begins to shine on Meryl. Instead of automatically deducting that it's from a sniper and taking cover, both Snake and Meryl proceed to stare at the beam and make confused noises for several seconds until she is shot.